Archive for July, 2013

What do you think of SOLITARY CONFINEMENT? Throughout the United States of America there are thousands of human beings being held in SOLITARY CONFINEMENT. Some for 25-30 years. Most that are locked up in this way get to leave and go to an exercise yard for 1 hour a day. The term “yard” is a misnomer for they are most often just put into another cell with concrete walls and no natural light.

Now, Tubularsock feels that no matter how violent or dangerous or fucked up a human being happens to be he/she should NEVER-EVER be subjected to this type of treatment (torture, actually). It should be, in my mind, common sense ……… so why is it so pervasive in our prison system?

Remember the Germans? The questions of guilt for the death camps have plagued the psyche of an entire generation of Germans. Why didn’t they do something about it, they had to have known!

Well when Tubularsock was taking a road trip across Germany a few years back that question crossed my mind. For some reason it came up while driving thru the Black Forest area of Germany. There was something thought provoking about the Black Forest for me. It is a very peaceful and pleasant area and one almost forgets the outside world. And I guess that was the insight. If I had lived in this area of Germany I doubt if I’d have even thought about death camps or what was happening in them.

Much like here in the U.S. while you’re driving and even if you pass a prison complex seldom do you give it much thought. Maybe a fleeting comment like, “I sure am glad I’m not in there!”. And that’s about it, Best Western here I come.

But what if you actually knew what was really going on in “there”. Would that make a difference to you. But you may not want to know because knowing carries with it responsibility … funny how that works. If you feel like it’s none of your concern then you’ll be just like the Germans. But not exactly. The Germans of that period of the deaths camps could have been arrested and even killed if they had pursued questioning about what was going on.

You CAN know and SHOULD know because you are paying for it to exist and in the act of paying for it you are in part responsible for it and the treatment of other living human beings.

The amazing thing is that it doesn’t take that much of your time to say NO TO SOLITARY CONFINEMENT. And the more people that say NO, the louder it gets.

Now if you write the prison system once and say NO TO SOLITARY CONFINEMENT you may get a nice letter back saying ……….. well mostly standard bullshit really.

Same goes for your Congress person, the President and any other government agency you choose. The bullshit level is rather high and consistent.

And it tends to go like this: (you can skip this part if you have written to a governmental official any time in your life —— the bull shit is the same —— the perfect formula to say NOTHING.

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Thank you for contacting me regarding . . . I appreciate that you took the time to express your concerns about this important issue.

Thank you for writing to express your concerns about . . . Your correspondence is important to me, and I welcome the opportunity to respond.

As this debate moves forward, I pledge to continue to . . .

Please know that I will keep your thoughts and concerns in mind throughout this important process.

I will continue to listen closely to what you . . .

I agree that strong and decisive action is needed to . . .

I strongly share your belief that the United States must take meaningful action to prevent . . .

My job is not merely about supporting or opposing legislation, but also about bridging the divide that has paralyzed our nation’s politics.

Again, thank you for taking the time to write. Please know that I will keep your comments in mind as I work with my colleagues to address . . .

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Currently the prisoners in the California prison system are in the middle of a hunger strike to bring attention to overcrowding and solitary confinement.

Unfortunately your options to be heard still rests on letter writing and on protest to call attention to this and most injustice in our society. And Tubularsock urges you to do what you can but the system that is in control seems to proceed regardless of your thoughts and feelings.

THIS CAN BE CHANGED!

But it will require a radical shift from writing and protest to ECONOMIC DISRUPTIONS and ECONOMIC BOYCOTTS.

The reason why writing Congress or the President is futile is because these people are just the corporate servants NOT the public servants.

The American public are still under the impression that what they were taught in their 8th grade civics book (if at all) is the way our system still works. Well, Tubularsock is not going to get into the fact that our system of government NEVER worked like that. And it is not going to change now.

The only way real change will take place in this country is by INTERRUPTING THE FLOW OF PROFIT. And one of the good old day mechanisms for doing this was the MONKEY-WRENCH.

You recall the idea of tossing the MONKEY WRENCH into the gears of a factory so that the production line is put out of order for a period of time. Remember?

Well we don’t have that many factories any-longer but we, as a people, have a hell-of-a-collection of MONKEY WRENCHES.

Ok ……………. Keeping in mind that the possibilities are limitless. It takes organization but not necessarily large masses of people for a disruption but for a boycott we need numbers, to state the obvious.

The pressure points are increasing cost and diminishing profit. This calls for a variety of direct actions. That will depend on the corporate culture we are confronting.

Corporation spend a huge sum of money on public relations. You know, “Looking Good”.

BP, Chevron, Exxon Mobil are ALL environmentalists if you trust their image work. And some people believe that shit. But Tubularsock thinks that it is used more to convince their employees that they are working for a good cause rather than raising havoc on the earth. Because a disgruntled or disillusioned employee is a dangerous “commodity”.

So if the Prison-Industrial-Complex needs a change in their current direction they have to be induced to do that. If it COSTS them rather than PROFITS them that alone will determine their direction.

MONKEY WRENCHES in the “machinery” shifts the costs to loss ………..

There are a huge number of citizen organizers out there. Social media alone moves ideas to actions faster than ever.

What we need to do is harness the citizens anger and helplessness into targeting selected corporations to show the true POWER OF THE PEOPLE.

In truth it only has to be accomplished once or twice to show its effectiveness.

At that point the power structure will take notice.

The fun point is we don’t have to confront the police or military or even break the windows out of Bank of America. We just have to STOP buying selectively, or stop putting our money into banks selectively. Or dozens of other activities which withholds from the corporation or businesses that supply that corporation. The tighter the withhold the quicker the change.

Well Tubularsock was minding his own business, no really I was. I was going off, a few blogs back, on how some people’s deaths appear more than just coincidences. Now if I tell you that a key witness in some mob trial gets offed most people would say, “why sure, that’s not a surprise”.

But if I tell you that some former CIA agent, or military special ops officer, or some journalist dies suddenly and unexpectedly the response is more likely, “well people die all the time, why make a case out of it”.

So. Back to Tubularsock minding his own business. In that recent blog about interesting and untimely deaths I received two comments. One was from Doggy Dix a person who has a fast mind and sharp wit and he informs me that a journalist was killed in LA that ties into my Blog post. He couldn’t remember details but Tubularsock had enough to go on to research for the details but could not find anything on the subject.

Then a blogger (Deconstructing Myths by Jeff Nguyen) who follows Tubularsock occasionally filled in the missing information. The journalist was Michael Hastings and he was the Rolling Stone reporter who embarrassed General McChrystal. Hastings died in a suspicious car crash in LA last month.

So Tubularsock checked into this incident and what was the first thing that JUMPED OUT when I Googled it?

CAR HACKING!

Now Tubularsock is not one to be interested in cars in general. I live in a city and my primary mode of transportation is my two wheeler. So when it comes to cars I have a very limited interest.

However, CAR HACKING now that’s another story. I had never even heard about CAR HACKING before and so my direction was charted and thus my story unfolds.

So of course being a modern man I googled it specifically!

And ….. Was Michael Hastings’ Car Hacked? Richard Clarke Says It’s Possible was the first thing that jumped out from the list of articles.

But knowing Clarke’s general take on things I decided to check out other information first and so the first article I was drawn to was from Popular Science and the article was The Science Of Car Hacking by Kelsey Atherton. And right from the get-go something seemed to be amiss ……… the focus of the article was one of trying to dissuade the idea that Michael Hastings’ car was hacked.

“Limitations first: hackers cannot magically gain control of a car. While cars are increasingly computerized, not every system involved in driving is hooked up to external controls. Let me repeat that for clarity: in almost every car currently on the road, it’s impossible to hack the steering. A hacker trying to kill someone via car can’t just take over and pilot the vehicle into a tree or off a cliff.”

Now if Richard Clarke says that car hacking is possible and Popular Science says it’s not likely then is Popular Science trying to mis-direct the reader? And if so then why?

The main reason I believe is that the Bonnier Corporation that owns the Popular Science magazine and 39 other American magazines is a Swedish holding company. Its headquarters are located In Winter Park, Florida. They are a conservative company and are not interested in ruffling any U.S. governmental agency.

So the focus of the article is away from any possible controversy. And the article was written with this in mind. Not that the article isn’t true to some degree and information was provided that hacking may be possible but just highly unlikely.

Now Richard Clarke who was the former U.S. National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection, and Counter-terrorism says, “What has been revealed as a result of some research at universities is that it’s relatively easy to hack your way into the control system of a car, and to do such things as cause acceleration when the driver doesn’t want acceleration, to throw on the brakes when the driver doesn’t want the brakes on, to launch an air bag. You can do some really highly destructive things now, through hacking a car, and it’s not that hard.”

By far the best informed source I found was Darlene Storm’s article Car hacking: Car cyberattack a possible theory behind journalist’s death at Computerworld Blogs.

Darlene Storm covers the entire story of Michael Hastings and links you up to two major studies done on car hacking. The one I liked best was the Comprehensive Experimental Analyses of Automotive Attack Surfacesa joint study done by the University of California, San Diego and the University of Washington in 2011.

In that study you’ll discover that any computer control in the car could be hacked, including the “engine, lights, radio, wipers and electronic display.” And these all can be accessed through wireless devices in the car like cellular, Bluetooth, radio and even the tire pressure monitoring system.

These cellular channels offer many advantages for attackers. They can be accessed over arbitrary distance (due to the wide coverage of cellular data infrastructure) in a largely anonymous fashion, typically have relatively high bandwidth, are two-way channels (supporting inter- active control and data exfiltration), and are individually addressable.”

Hastings was driving a 2013 Mercedes C250 coupe with all the bells and whistles. The more expensive the car the more susceptible to hacking!

The Comprehensive Experimental Analyses of Automotive Attack Surfaces joint study is actually a fun read if you like that kind of shit and by the time Tubularsock was finished he knew way too much. It did make me feel a bit more secure because when I do have to drive it’s in a RED 1987 Suzuki Samara and so I’m used to the horn, wipers, accelerator, and radio all working on their own without my control. So what’s the big deal?

The LA police department is treating this as a routine car accident but Tubularsock looks at it like Sherlock Holmes and routine is so boring.

So Hasting’s Mercedes C250 coupe was coming southbound on Highland Avenue and it was “. . . going really fast and all of a sudden I seen it jackknife”, according to Luis Cortez a witness to the scene in an interview with KTLA.

So we have high speed (acceleration) ………. we have jackknife (brakes)

“The car was going so fast, the engine was found more than 100 feet away from the crash.” according to The Los Angeles Times from information they gathered from Gary Grossman and his neighbor in the area.

So we have high speed ………… we have jackknife ……….. we have ejected engine

Another neighbor described hearing a huge explosion drawing him and several others outside their homes.

So we have high speed ………. we have jackknife ……….. we have ejected engine …….. we have explosion

The car fire was so intense that it took the LA coroner two days to identify Hastings’ body.

So we have high speed ………. we have jackknife ……….. we have ejected engine …….. we have explosion ………. we have intense fire

Hastings had sent an email hours before his death stating, “FBI Investigation re: NSA”, “go off the radar for a bit.” AND He “was researching a story about a privacy lawsuit brought by Florida socialite Jill Kelley against the Department of Defense and the FBI.”

So we have high speed (acceleration) ………. we have jackknife (brakes) ……….. we have ejected engine (?) …….. we have explosion (foul play?) ………. we have intense fire (?) …….. we have intrigue (plenty)

Now according to Clarke, the “expertise to trace such an (cyber) attack” is beyond the expertise of the LA Police Department and “I think whoever did it would probably get away with it.” Clarke emphasized that he was not saying that there was a cyberattack only that a cyberattack on the vehicle would have been nearly impossible to trace ‘even if the dozen or so computers on board hadn’t melted’.”

Ok, ok …………. Tubularsock says maybe yes, maybe no.

Sherlock Holmes says ………… why not check the cell phones records and see if any calls were made to that car’s computer system at the time of the accident. I’m sure the LA police are capable of that! What is there to lose?

Well what would a four day weekend be without political levity, right.

Tubularsock just can’t let this degree of raw stupidity go by without comment. It is just too fun!

As most Tubularsock readers know I have not had a TV for over forty years now so to trace this down I had to go into the never-never-land of CNN. And trace down Candy Crowley who happens to be (my first time viewing her style) one of the worst ask-nothing-challenging commentators I have ever seen. God she is boring!

And it wasn’t easy to find what I was looking for on the net without many stops along the way but perseverance does pay off. Even for a joke!

Now the interview or was it a kiss General Dempsey’s ass? Ok, the kiss General Martin Dempsey ass exchange was a grueling excursion into rehearsed-bull-shit-personified.

For those of you that don’t know, General Martin Dempsey is a short little prick who happens to be the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And Candy Crowley is either a large boned woman or fat CNN commentator who is still holding down her job as a propagandist for the corporate/governmental play-like-news-show.

Part of the interview was the “try to make this prick Dempsey look human” part. The set up was the staged casual chit-chat about Dempsey’s Fourth of July where he sang the Star Spangled Banner or one of those disgusting tunes at some opening of a ball game.

Tubularsock will admit right here that after watching that I immediately checked the web to see if there were any openings in al-Qaeda.

Then there was the sit down kiss-ass session and it ran like drivel down a prescribed trivial track. How two people can say so much nothing for so long is an art form in itself.

But finally in the last 2 or 3 minutes, wouldn’t you know, came what I was searching for

and here is the transcript with Tubularsock’s thoughts:

CROWLEY: I need to ask you about the damage you believe Edward Snowden has done.

(who assumed Snowden did any damage except expose the truth?)

DEMPSEY: There has been damage. I don’t think we actually have been able to determine the depth of that damage.

(this is the classic, I don’t have a clue statement)

CROWLEY: Because honestly, you know, people look at it and you think, I figured people were monitoring phone calls of terrorists.

(NO! HONESTLY, people look at it and say, those fuckers are listening in on ME!)

DEMPSEY: Yes.

(we are on script.)

CROWLEY: So how – why is it damaging to now kind of know that?

(gee, Candy because they have been lying to us AND YOU ONLY STILL “KIND-OF-KNOW-THAT”?)

DEMPSEY: Well, I think it’s always, you know, you always have our adversaries always believe more of us than – often believe more of us than we might actually be able to accomplish. This actually puts a degree of granularity on it that allows them now to change their tactics. (Come now, the only people that haven’t kept up with this spying is the frightened American public. BUT THE KEY TO THIS RESPONSE IS THE ATTEMPTED COVER UP …… GOSH WE CAN’T DO ALL YOU THINK WE CAN DO. IN THIS CASE HOWEVER, THEY CAN AND THEY ARE STILL DOING IT!)

And it’s also – you’ve heard me speak often about the basis of relationships and the importance of trust.(NOW THIS IS THE PART THAT HAS CAUSED ME TO WRITE THIS ENTIRE BLOG! OUR SPYING ON OUR ALLIES AND WHAT THEY ARE DOING HAS DAMAGED “TRUST”?

THE BASIS OF RELATIONSHIP IS TRUST SO WE TRUST OUR ALLIES SO MUCH THAT WE SPY ON THEM?

DOES DEMPSEY EVER LISTEN TO HIMSELF?)

And it’s – you know it has undermined a bit of that. What we’re –

A BIT OF THAT?

CROWLEY: With other nations you mean?

(no Candy, with the Martians landing for Christ’s sake!)

DEMPSEY: Yes, yes, of course. We’ll work our way back. But it has set us back temporarily.

(SURE HONEY, I’VE BEEN SLEEPING WITH THE NEIGHBOR BUT TRUST ME IT’S ONLY GOING TO BE TEMPORARILY.)

So Tubularsock feels better just going off. And may I remind you that the brain cell damage from your TV set is dangerous to your being. And no ……. both the History Channel and NPR are just repackaged SHIT.

Tubularsock was speaking to a scholarly gentleman today and the entire Edward Snowden calamity presented itself. His view was that Daniel Ellsberg was more “hero-like” when he got out the Pentagon Papers because he stayed and “faced the music”.

Without going into the Ellsberg’s truth giving, bottom line, he didn’t have to face the draconian Patriot Act. You know the one ………. it literally removes the citizen’s (THAT’S YOU!) rights ……. PERIOD!

And your friendly Congress passed it into LAW without reading it.

And they continue to renew it without reading it.

Too many people live with The IDEA of America rather than what’s in front of them. It doesn’t make sense but they do anyway. They still think we are the “good guys” and we’re not. We have become the 21st Century Nazis going for world domination.

But like President Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela said, “He (Snowden) did not kill anyone and did not plant a bomb. What he did was tell a great truth in an effort to prevent wars. He deserves protection under international and humanitarian law.”

It takes a Venezuelan to set us straight?

It takes Snowden to attempt to find JUSTICE and PROTECTION in of all places …….. China and Russia?

This is where we are as a country? Shit …….. WE ARE FUCKED!

And then there is this:

“I think he damaged the security of the country,” former President George W. Bush said in a CNN interview.

If any one would even care what Bush says after putting up with his “reign of error” should be ashamed of themselves. SHIT IN SHIT OUT! It only goes to show that his “old blue haired douche-bag”** of a mother, Barbara, should have had an abortion.

“I think that anybody thought he was a hero to begin with, now that he’s threatening in any event to share information with Russia and China, if he in fact has any information, I think that should disabuse anybody of the notion— that he is a hero,” she said.

Now Nancy, Snowden wouldn’t be in China or Russia if YOU had done your job.

YOU didn’t read the Patriot Act before you signed it, now did you!

It appears that what Snowden exposed doesn’t seem to matter but killing the message does. The real question Nancy is how are you going to stop the NSA spying on American citizens? Can you do that Nancy? Tubularsock thinks not!

How about this Nancy ……… YOU provided safe passage for Snowden and YOU provided a Congressional platform for Snowden to expose the rest of what you think he may share with China and Russia.

And none of those “closed” sessions but an actual transparent view so the citizens can see what is really up …………. that way the citizens could see whether Snowden is a hero or not.

But for the gutless wonders such as yourself, you’d be afraid to do that ……..

YOU’D RATHER PONTIFICATE BULL SHIT THAN FACE WHAT SNOWDEN IS EXPOSING AND PUT A STOP TO IT.

But the reality is:

Now in truth if Snowden returned to the U.S. the government would send him to a federal court in Virginia. The Virginia federal court is known as the “rocket docket” because of its speed and remarkable success in kangaroo proceedings with a high rate of convictions of national security and cyber crimes. The Virginia Federal Court would make even Stalin proud with it’s ability to convict those accused of espionage and terrorism.

Now in all fairness (a silly criteria in today’s environment) Snowden didn’t commit espionage because even though he took information considered secret or confidential without permission he exposed it to its owners ….. THE PEOPLE! We paid for it so it is ours. So will somebody throw General Keith Anderson in jail for keeping this information from it’s owners? General Keith Anderson is an enemy of THE PEOPLE!

And Snowden hasn’t committed treason because to do that, according to the Supreme Court’s interpretation of an act of treason, Snowden would have to had aided the enemy within the confines of a declaration of war by Congress. The “war on terror” is NOT a declared war by Congress! The Korean and Vietnam Wars were not declared wars by Congress either.

So lets see what Snowden knows and then WE THE PEOPLE can figure out if we should arrest and prosecute him or put Anderson and Clapper in the slammer!